


Fallout

by proprioception (sacrificethemtothesquid)



Series: Shrapnel [5]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Radiation Sickness, Rough Sex, generally a bad day for everyone all around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 05:11:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11502459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sacrificethemtothesquid/pseuds/proprioception
Summary: Fallout (n):1. radioactive particles that gradually fall back as dust2. the adverse side effects or results of a situation.





	Fallout

**Author's Note:**

> This is set immediately after [Glow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11354775)

They drive. It’s something approaching leisurely; they’re in relatively neutral territory, a vast stretch of unwanted waste. There’s nothing here to claim, and no one here to claim it. They have fifteen days of water and twelve days of guzzoline, if they do their best to sip sparingly on both. The car was recently loaded and rides low and slow. Max eases through the loose sand, balancing the thin line between movement and efficiency with expert skill.

Furiosa is used to larger, heavier vehicles with many more wheels. The War Rig had three sets on the cab, and three doubled sets on the tanker, a fortune in rubber and steel. What she couldn’t finesse, she could simply overpower, and Max’s stripped chassis, even when creaking under full drums, is still light and skittish.

Much like its driver. He hunches over the wheel, one eye on the side mirrors to gauge the depth of the dust. He has a sixth sense for solid ground, and every chance he finds some, he stops to clean the air and oil filters and check the tire pressure.  

As he checks, she keeps watch. There only movement on the horizon is the distant shimmer of mirage, false images of mountains and water melting and reforming in the distance. Once, a lizard skittered out of a hole, startled, and she takes it down with her boot.

She hasn’t eaten in hours, but her stomach’s been a hard knot of anxiety for days, and she offers the lizard to Max instead. The look he gives her is hard and flat, but she’s killed men for less, and so he relents.

She doesn’t want to admit how rattled she is. The memory of his body shuddering as she held him up is sunk deep in her bones, and the more she tries to swallow it back, the more it rises up like bile. She knows he sees it, because he curls against her at night and doesn’t comment on the stiffness locking her limbs.

They are alone. There haven’t been any tracks, animal or vehicle or otherwise. What scrub exists has been scoured by wind and crisped by the heat. The sun is brutal, and they retreat beneath scarves, goggles and long shirts. Max has the detector connected to the car battery with a long wire, and Furiosa holds it in her lap like a talisman, delicate and priceless. Its crackle is faint, barely audible above the engine, and she makes herself breathe through the steel band around her ribs.

Five days in, they’re sitting on the roof of the car, watching the last rays of the sun slip over the horizon, red and thick. It looks like blood on the sand, and her missing hand clenches painfully.

“It gets worse, you know.” Max isn’t looking at her; he’s running a cloth through the barrel of his shotgun, trying to wipe away the worst of the ubiquitous dust. “When you don’t eat.”

Panic closes hard around her throat.

“You got two options,” he continues. “You can drive on your brakes and burn ‘em out. Or you can ease up and get your fuel.”

She is physically incapable of easing up. She’s burned through her brakes and is careening out of control. He seems remarkably nonplussed about the fact that six days ago, he’d spent thirty-six hours messily dying in front of her, and during one of his lucid moments, he’d told her that worse could happen in thirty days. She’s used to surviving day by day, but having a deadline looming is a hard hit to the solar plexus, leaving her gasping and unable to breathe.

“Last time I got sick,” he says, “nothing happened.”

 _You said last time, it wasn’t so bad,_  she wants to scream, but she can’t make a sound. He’d said a month, but she hears the echo of the wild-eyed woman in her ears: _You got ten days, twenty - nobody knows. One day, you wake up and you shit and you die._

She doesn’t know anything about radiation, but she is very well-acquainted with death. The worst threat is the one she knows is coming, but can’t see when or from where.

“Hey,” he says, and any other time, he’d reach for her and she’d respond. She’d let him work the tension from her muscles, and lay her back to unravel her with his fingers. Tonight, she’s locked so tightly inside herself that his hand on her arm ignites old memories of being touched by someone else, someone who will not stop, someone who will persist and hold her down and make himself the wedge as he splits her in two.

“Furi-” Max’s voice is too far away, and then he’s handing her a waterskin she can’t hold, water spilling over shaking hands.

He lets her sit, immobile statue that she is. There isn’t enough of a moon to drive, and he’s still recovering his strength. He sets up the bedroll and after a moment’s hesitation, puts a folded blanket on the roof of the car, close enough for her to reach if she wanted. He lies down, but she can tell by his breathing he’s not asleep.

They’re edging up on ten days. He _looks_ fine, but she thinks of burns without heat, of a force swift and invisible knocking him down mid-stride.

They’ve been away from the Citadel for forty-eight days, and it’s the longest she’s ever been gone, the furthest distance she’s ever been. She’d been excited for this, the prospect of a long, uncharted run after countless smaller scouting excursions. They hadn’t set a return date, and the girls had managed to swallow back their obvious and immediate protest. She’s been a prisoner of the Citadel for most of life, and driving away felt as though her lungs were expanding for the very first time. Max had felt it too, and kept the engine high and hot until the sheer speed left them half-drunk and needy. That night, they should have kept watch, but it wasn’t physically possible: he was reaching for her as soon as they got out of the car, a firestorm of heat and want, and she matched him thrust for thrust, the perfect movement of cylinder and piston until the redline utterly shattered.

Out here in the Waste, until Max got sick, she was as stable as she’s ever been. They both slept unencumbered, limbs entangled and boneless. The ghosts kept their distance, and his sentences grew longer and more clear. They woke with the sun and ate, and drove as it suited them. There was no set direction, just a vague goal of exploring and seeing if there was anything out there that might somehow benefit the Citadel.

For the first time since she and Valkyrie rode their bike out into the dunes, Furiosa felt _free_.

She’s burned the town. The piece known as the Glow is out of human hands, its owners dead. Max still has shadows under his eyes and more stubble than she’s accustomed to, but he’s alive, he’s drinking, he’s walking and driving. He hums and mumbles and watches her with grave concern, as if she’s the one who fell.

The watching is the worst. It claws at her senses, inflames parts of her she’d almost managed to forget. She’s supposed to be watching him, observing, waiting for something that might not come. She’s supposed to be his bulwark against the world, and instead, she’s losing her mind.

The second day he was sick, she’d had a nightmare that sheared open her phantom arm, and although she needs her prosthesis for defense, for balance and the thousand other small ways she’s come to rely on it, she can suddenly feel muscles and tendons flood with blazing sparks. Having her prosthesis on makes it worse: she can clench a phantom fist, but unless she makes the familiar motion in her shoulder and elbow, the claw stays open, incongruous and heavy. Movements that for thousands of days have been second nature are suddenly gone, short-circuited by a terrifying, inescapable marrow-deep smolder.

She’s reached for him at night, and come up short. She’s gone to balance herself against the car, and almost fallen. Her human fingers fumble with bullet casings, with wire connections she knows by heart. She feels like she’s frantically running along the crest of a dune as it sloughs off behind her.

She cannot control what happens to Max, and suddenly she cannot control anything else.

She still can’t breathe, not really, but she has enough control over herself that she forces stiff muscles into movement, and jumps down from the car. She’s utterly exhausted, and the night chill makes her feel like a cloud of breath, pale and ephemeral.

Beneath his own blankets, Max is bundled up in his jacket and scarf and still shivering a little, and for one long moment, her mind goes completely blank, her body severed at the spine and unable to gasp or scream. “Hurry _up_ ,” he mumbles, opening the blanket a little, and then there’s pressure back in her hydraulics.

“ _Cold,_ ” he observes, and it must be a statement, because it explains why she feels like brittle plastic. “C’mere.”

Nerveless, she lets him bundle her up like a spider’s prey, and then he wraps himself around her, warm and solid. He doesn’t ask if she’s all right; he already knows, and if she goes too far off the tracks, he’ll bring her back.

He is the most grounding force she’s ever felt. He is gravity, he is the response of the tires to the steering wheel, the grinding connection between shifter and transmission. He is _reliable_ , and five days ago, she _almost_ _lost him_ , and she has been utterly blindsided by how much _reliable_ means.

Suddenly, she needs to feel him, to be absorbed by him. She rolls in her cocoon, her mouth desperately seeking his. He doesn't even hiss at the icy brush of her fingers, clawing instead at the blankets as she grinds against his thigh.

“This okay?” he mutters against her neck, and she's almost derailed, because it _is,_ and more than that, she really, really needs to not think right now. He asks, he _always_ asks, and he asks again and again with the same cadence as the thrust of his hips. He asks if it’s okay because sometimes it's not, sometimes it's deep or painful or wrong, and in those moments he stops regardless of his own desire.

This is not one of those moments.

The sound he gasps against her isn’t mindless passion. It’s a constant, searching question: _yes? yes? yes?_

It took her way too long to realize her consent is the most powerful aphrodisiac, the thing that turns him into melted slag.

So she says yes, over and over and over, a hitched and breathy answer until the sounds they make become one long, beautiful keen.

 

****

 

She’s nestled against his chest, her ear pressed to his heart, the steady bellows of his lungs against her cheek. Above in the cloudless dark, stars float in thick, ropy clusters, like algae in a toxic pool. One moves against the flow of the sky, low and bright and silent. She watches its transit until it’s swallowed up by the dense air on the horizon.

 _Satellite_.

She doesn’t want to find them, not if they belong to the ones who are interested in buying things like the Glow. She’s had the detector within reach for five days, paranoid and primed for its noise. Twice, she’s rocketed out of a deep sleep, its malevolent crackle in her ears when it was only Max rustling in a pack or making a small fire out of salvaged scrub. The look he’s given her is searing, but she can’t find the air to tell him.

Tonight’s the same. She finally falls asleep, a shallow, fitful place where she’s trapped in a cloud of satellites like fist-sized moths, each one leaving a trail of shimmering blue aurora. One floats close enough that the tail slithers across her stump, leaving a dark, painless rash in its place, and she comes awake with an aborted shriek.

Max holds the twitching body of a small brown snake. His knife is dripping blood, the snake’s head in his lap.

She can’t breathe. Her phantom hand is _burning_ , wild and inescapable, and she is definitely going to be sick.

He makes a concerned noise as she trips out of the bedroll and staggers away from camp.

When it’s done, she sinks down to her knees, head tilted back as she tries to remember a time when everything was under control, when she knew her path and how to drive it. She was an Imperator once, a vehicle to be driven by someone else’s command. She knew her place and what was expected of her, and even if atrocities were committed, there was a twisted joy in being competent, in being trusted by her enemy.

Once, she was a vehicle, and she’d started to peel away her metal shell. Those last thousand days at the Citadel, she’s started weaving herself into something more human, but out here in the waste, she feels the fibers coming apart, the warp and weft stretching around gaping holes in the pattern.

Then it hits her with the delayed shock of an unexpected bullet, that she’s just _vomited_  and that’s _exactly_ how Max had started dying.

Is it _contagious?_ She’s never fucking _asked_ -

Her hand hurts. Her _hand_ , the hand that’s been missing for thousands of days, the one that barely tingled, and suddenly since the Glow, it’s all she can do to just grit her teeth and swallow back her scream. Radiation can’t be seen or smelled or tasted, but neither can her _hand_ -

Her throat clamps shut, and she’s suddenly incandescent, immolated, steel and guzzoline and wire utterly immovable and instantly vaporized.  

She doesn’t hear Max coming up behind her, but then he’s there, pressed against her spine, a solid, familiar weight. One by one, the disparate parts of her start coming back together in slowly-growing clumps, like curds developing in Mothers’ Milk.

“Hey,” he whispers, “hey. _Hey_.”

“I think- I think I’ve got it,” she croaks out, shaking hard and hunched over her missing arm. “I think-”

“You don’t,” he says firmly, the rumble of his words a physical force against her shoulder. “You don’t, I promise.”

“ _How?_ ” she rasps. Can’t he _see?_

“Doesn’t work that way,” he says. “Just...doesn’t. ‘S not a disease.”

“You,” she manages, “and _me_ , we _-”_

“ _Doesn’t work that way,_ ” he repeats.

“Then _why_ -” and she can only gesture to her phantom limb, absent muscles so tight and clenched that if she had a knife, she’d cut it off all over again, just to stop the _pain_.

“Don’t know.”

“It hurts,” she says, and the voice that comes out is small and plaintive and she _hates_ it. Out here, everything hurts - she knows that, she knows it in her marrow, had it drilled into her by Katie Concannon, day after day after day.

“I _know,_ ” he hums, and he curls around her with guilt, as if it’s his fault she’s falling apart, as if it’s his fault she’s hunched here losing her mind.

She knows about panic. She knows it rises and crests like a dune. She knows when it starts to fall, draining out like unstable sand beneath her tires. If she can just keep breathing, if she can focus on something, anything, narrowing her awareness down to a single, solid point, she can ride it out. So many times, Max is that point, the counterbalance to her flailing, the hard-packed ground upon which she spins. He’s been that point since her very first attack - that awful night with Toast and the girls and the overwhelming smell of juniper - and he’s been that point in every one since. It honestly hasn’t occurred to her to focus on anything else.

A tactical oversight, the worst she’s ever committed.

She hasn’t really thought about what she’ll do if he’s gone. She’s been hit by these moments in his absence, and when it happens she’s thought about him, about his warmth, his hands. She’s buried her face in her bedding, dredging up the lingering scent of him, and let it wash over her.

She’d thought she was getting better. When they’d left the Citadel, the moments were getting less common, more aberrant than incapacitating. She’d thought it was growing pains, like the muscle ache during strength training. She’s healing from a wound she didn’t know she had, and breaking down scar tissue is a hard and agonizing process.

She doesn’t know what she’s done to lose the strength she’s gained. She has suddenly and catastrophically atrophied, and now she’s shattering under the lightest load. Maybe the scar tissue protected her like a criss-cross of reinforcing welds, and not having it - specifically, not having it outside of the protective walls of the Citadel - leaves her as open and vulnerable as a newly-shed lizard.

Max has gotten better too. He’s bloomed in the shadow of the Citadel like a spiny, hesitant desert plant, unfurling in the damp, cool quiet of her room. Still, his thorns are integral to who he is, and even if he’s let her in, let her lie against his soft underbelly, the spikes are still there defending him, defending them both.

It’s a fundamental difference between them. She has never in her life had anyone to protect her, and she’s had to fight twice as hard because of that. He’s the same, but he’s stepped easily behind her, guarded her blind spots and watching her back without expectation or demand. Even after all this time, she finds it jarring, but she’s come to expect it, to rely on it.

The ways this man is _reliable_ will be the death of her.  

“Do you understand?” he says. “You’re okay. I’m okay. It’s fine.”

She _doesn’t_ understand, and they are _not_ okay, and it’s _not_ fine, but he’s searching her face for his own reassurance, so she makes herself nod, and lets him lead her back to camp.

 

****

 

He hums at her and prods at her and generally makes a nuisance of himself showing her that he’s fine. She wants to be grumpy about it and resist, because on some level she’s furious that he’s not taking her concerns seriously, but it’s _Max_ , and she is abjectly helpless to the rare occasions he decides to be charming.

They drive for ten days, and nothing happens. They find a trading post and fuel up, exchanging some limited information and a few less-useful parts. Two days later, they find an undefended spring - a bare trickle, hardly more than a damp patch of sand - and spend a good sixteen hours slowly ladling it up. Between that and the tarp he rigs up to collect the fog at night, their tanks are almost full.

They consult his map. She hates the dark brown lines and the marks he cuts in his skin to make them. The map is getting big enough that he’s stitched another scrap of fabric to it, but it doesn’t help them for where they’re going.

“Ten days south?” he asks.

Furiosa shrugs. “She said the trader had enough supplies for that.”

“Doesn’t mean he wasn’t going to fill up further.” He picks at the scab on his thumb, and sketches in the spring.

The traders at the post two days back were wary, and if they knew about the people who buy things like the Glow, they’d feigned ignorance. It was frustrating, because she’s grinding her teeth both wanting and not wanting to know, and being caught in the middle is maddening. Her missing arm is a steady, clawing ache, and between her arm and a sudden flare up of his bad knee, since the trading post, they’ve not been exactly congenial travelling companions. They haven’t even fucked, huddling together only for warmth in the chilly desert night.

He looks up from the map, wrapping the ever-present bandage around his hand. “Where d’we head?”

She’s spent so much time lying awake at night, squinting up at the sky and trying to make sense of the crawling pinpricks scattered across the dark. “South?”

He frowns. “Flying south to north doesn’t mean that’s the way.”

She grits her teeth as the needles in her phantom arm bite down even harder than usual. “Where _else_ should we go?”

“South is fine,” he says. “Just saying.”

Rubbing her naked stump, she stalks off to the other side of the car. He’s right, of course, and even though he’s an easy target, her frustration ultimately isn’t with him.

She thinks she might actually want to go home, but the chances of them successfully coming this far again are slim. Out here, everything hurts, and she _knows_ that, but just once, she’d like to have a brief moment of comfort and solace.

“Hey,” he says quietly. He’s leaning on the corner of the car, letting the bumper take the weight off his bad knee.

He hurts too. She forgets that he’s come to rely on the Citadel as a safe haven almost as much as she does. They wear the same brand, and even though he’s a creature of the waste, he’s inexorably tied to the rocky towers in his own way.

“Sorry,” she says. “I know it’s not your fault.”

He shrugs. “Not yours, either.”

Mothers, he won’t even let her wallow. “What if we run out of fuel?”

“Always some place.”

“What if there’s not?”

“Found one this time, didn’t we?”

He drifts. He’s good at it. He doesn’t experience the same anxiety she does, because he’s survived this long on sheer luck alone. She’s been bound to the Citadel and its resources, and hasn’t had to scrabble nearly as much. Not knowing where the next can of fuel or bottle of water can be found claws at her almost as much as the ache in her missing arm. She can improvise a battle plan or a weapon as easily as breathing; improvising supplies is much more of a challenge.

“We’ll find some,” he repeats, and she hugs her missing arm to her chest.

“I know.” It’s been seventeen days, and he’s fine. She thinks if they can make it to twenty, maybe something inside her will come unclenched.

“Hey,” he says again, his head twitching in an unspoken invitation.

Heaving a sigh, she crosses the distance, and drops her head to his shoulder, letting herself inhale the familiar musk of his skin. He drops his lips to her forehead, his bandaged hand coming up to rest on her neck, reassuring. “Sometimes, there’s no destination,” he says into her hair. “Sometimes, you just go.”

“You wander,” she supplies. “What do you look for, then?”

She can feel his shrug. “Said redemption, once.”

“And now?”

He hums, hesitant. “Something better, maybe.”

“Better than what?”

“Better than now.” He’s quiet a moment. “Wasn’t looking, before. Just running, was all.”

“What does better even mean?” She hurts and she’s frustrated and she’s in completely unfamiliar territory, and more than that, she’s terrified that she’s going to lose him and any hope she’s ever had.

She shouldn’t rely on him so much, she’s left herself wide open-

“Better…” He pauses, chewing the words slowly. “Wasn’t good at staying, before. Had to go. Had to, mm, keep going. Wasn’t anything. Wasn’t solid.”

She knows. Herself, she’d been nothing but solid, steel and iron and painfully compressed power.

“Wandered,” he says. “Looking for...dunno. Better sense of self, in the end.”

She breathes into his neck, feeling the tension leaking from her muscles and unable to hate herself for it. “Have you found it yet?”

“Think so.” He kisses her forehead again. “Not against looking some more.”

“We don’t have to go south.”

“South is fine. Got nowhere else to be.”

He’s so good, this man. The things she’s done, the person she’s been - she doesn’t deserve to have his time, but here he is, tucking her against his shoulder like she’s something fragile and rare.

She turns her face towards his and meets his mouth halfway. It’s soft and it’s sweet and it’s sad. The ache in her chest matches the ache in her arm, and before she can swallow it back, her eyes are prickly and flooding.

“Hey,” he murmurs, and it’s both a reassurance and an agreement.

 _We keep moving_. She just doesn’t want to keep moving without him.

 

****

 

Thirteen days later, they’re working on the car and he gestures for a wrench. “Hand me, mm-”

She’s on her back under the engine, chasing down a bad electrical connection. She threads the tool up through the chassis, and he nods his thanks, his grin just visible around the radiator case.

Her heart shudders to a stop in her chest: there’s a thin trickle of blood working its way from his left nostril. She’s tried not to think about it and they’re at _thirty-one_ days, and she’d almost convinced herself- “ _Max-_ ”

He straightens up immediately, scanning the horizon with one hand on his pistol. She’s already out from under the car. “Where,” he mutters, still looking in the distance.

She pantomimes dabbing her own nose.

He repeats the gesture, frowning when his fingers come away red. “Huh.” At her wild expression, he shakes his head. “It’s dry, dusty.”

She can’t breathe.

_You got ten days, twenty - nobody knows._

_One day, you wake up and you shit and you die_

“Stop,” he says firmly, pushing a rag up to his face. “Furi - _stop_.” It’s the closest she’s ever heard him come to using a tone of command, and it goes straight into her bones.

She knows that tone. She can follow that tone. Mechanically, she gets him water and a fresh damp cloth. He cleans himself up.

“This thing,” he mutters. “‘S not healthy.”

“I know.” She doesn’t _want_ to feel like a live wire, constantly sparking at the slightest touch.

“Got to stop.”

“I _know_.”

He sighs. “Hate seeing you like this.”

And there, that’s it. That’s the worst. It’s the worst thing he’s ever said, and the worst she’s ever felt, and in all the atrocities she’s ever committed, she has never hated herself more than she does at this moment.

She swallows hard, sucking the soft, fearful parts back into her chest and letting her face fall into the familiar blank Imperator expression. Max still has the cloth pressed to his face, and his eyes go wide and angry.

“ _No_ , don’t you _dare-_ ”

“What am I supposed to do?” she hisses. “Pretend it’s not a thing?”

“‘S _not_ a thing-”

“You keep _saying_ that-”

“Because it’s _not_ ,” he bursts out. “Keep telling you - it's fine-”

“ _She said it wasn't!_ ” The words burst out like a blown tire, but she's going too fast to stop, and panic like shredded rubber is thumping frantically against her ribs.

“That was her! She'd had it longer-”

“We had it too-”

“Not like that.” She opens her mouth to protest, the gasping reflex of a landed fish, but he's fanging it ahead of her. “The longer you touch it, the worse it gets. The closer you are, the worse it gets. We had parts, we didn’t have _it_ . _It_ was the part that’s bad. I got - shrapnel. I got _nothing_.”

“It wasn’t _nothing-_ ”

“You can’t say that,” he snaps. “You don’t know and you don’t _listen."_

Mothers, she thinks he's actually _angry._  She's seen him caught in the desperate rush of battle, seen him frustrated and overwrought.She has never seen him truly angry, and he's angry at _her_.

She was wrong. _This_ is the worst she's ever felt. It feels like glass cascading down around her, sharp and hard, the destruction of something impossibly precious. She needs to stop. She needs to step back, to take a breath, to control the sick flush of heat spreading down her neck, but she can’t, her mouth is moving beyond her control. “ _You_ don’t know, and _you_ don’t listen because you don’t fucking _remember,_ you weren’t even _awake_ -”

“Was _not_ that bad-”

“It was!” There’s a hysterical hitch in her voice, and it’s not _her_ , it's not who she is: it’s raw and ragged and utterly out of control. It’s everything she hates and everything she’s ever fought against and tried to swallow back, and it’s flooding out in a huge, terrible rush. “Three days, Fool, it was _three fucking days_ , and when I went _back-_ ” Mercifully, her throat clenches closed before she can damn herself further.

He knows anyway. He sees it in her face. He sees it as if she’s said it, as if she’s spelled it out and drawn a diagram. His expression goes completely, horribly blank. “Went back.”

He hadn’t been conscious. He’d been more than half dead, and she’s been out of her mind with grief and fury, and she’d had nowhere to put it, nowhere to direct the wild energy consuming her-

“I had to see if there was a cure,” she makes herself say, and the agony of her missing arm is a crushing, inescapable pressure radiating up her neck.

“There isn’t,” he says flatly.

“So I learned.”

He’s staring her down with the most awful, utterly featureless look in his eyes. “Then what.” It’s not a question, and _mothers_ , she was desperately hoping he wouldn’t ask it, but of course he has to, even though he already knows the answer.

“They were already dead.” It’s not a lie; the wild-eyed woman had said it herself.

He barely blinks, a muscle in his temple working as he waits.

She’s going to vomit. He’s going to make her say this, and he’s going to be upset, and she is slowly, painfully dying right in front of him. He’s the good one, he’s the defender of the weak; she knows this about him, she _knows_ , and she is the one with blood on her hands and in this case, in this moment, not a single fucking regret. She sets her jaw. “We keep moving.”

Something in him crumbles, and no, _this_ is the worst moment. This is the moment where he sees her, _truly_ sees the awful, twisted thing that she is, and this is the moment he _hears_ the way she twists the truth to suit her own ends. She’s trying to make herself look better, an instinctual urge for self-preservation. If he were Joe, she’d be extolling the violence, glorifying the shot and the destruction in lurid, exacting detail. Instead, she’s hedging away, trying desperately not to lie and failing.

“I _had_ to,” she bursts out, wild fury exploding from her lungs. “I fucking _had_ to. She knew it was poison, she _knew_ , and she _gave_ it to us, and _you_ -”

“Do _not_ use me,” he warns, “as your excuse.”

“It’s not an excuse!” Except it is, it _is_ , and she has no defense against that. She has no defense against any of it. She’s only got the poison in her own bones that runs like lead, hot and terrible and deep. They are seventy-four days away from the Citadel, and the green is sloughing off of her like charred and blackened skin. Her arm is burning, _she_ is burning, and because she can’t control any of that, she’d torched an entire town and never looked back. “They _lied_ ,” she snaps. “They lied, and I-” she makes herself say it, makes herself push it out like a rotten tooth- “I was _so fucking scared_ , Fool. I was _losing_ you, and _they_ were the reason why, and I had- I had to, I couldn’t make myself stop, and I...I didn’t _want_ to.”

Her final statement hangs between them like malevolent smoke.

His expression still hasn’t changed, and it’s _awful_. The pain is spiking hard up her arm, and she’s grinding her teeth to dust, furious and agonized tears sparking in her eyes.

“Why?” he finally says, and it’s so weary and almost _plaintive_ that she bites her lip hard enough that blood spurts into her mouth, oily and thick. She’s bleeding, it’s dribbling down her chin and he’s bleeding, a slow, steady trickle from his nose. They’re both going to die of this, of the Glow and the chaos of its fallout.

“I need you,” she whispers. There’s nothing left of her. He should just leave her, leave her out here in the Waste to die and wither under the harsh, unforgiving sun. Someone will find her, maybe, eventually, the mummified corpse of an unrepentant murderer.

“You _don’t_ -”

“I _do_ , Fool, I- you’re _reliable_ -” It’s the wrong word, the wrong way to say it; she knows immediately but she can’t cram it back into her mouth, can’t inhale the air to make it unheard.

“I am _not,_ ” he grinds out, “ _reliable_.”

These are old tracks. They haven't driven them often, but the ruts run treacherously deep.

“I didn't-” she tries to say, but he’s already fanging ahead.

“I wasn't there,” he growls. “When she...I walked in, and there _he_ was-”

His son. Her guts clench. Mothers, she hates this, she hates _herself_ -

“Missed it,” he goes on, voice like grinding glass. “Didn't even- and then, _then-_  wasn't there. Not when they-”

He'd missed his son's birth, and then he'd missed his son's death.

“You _are_ ,” she shoots back. “You are, and I-”

“Don’t,” he says, and there’s the hard hitch of tears in his voice. “Just- _don’t_ -” and he turns his back, _mothers,_  he turns his back and starts to stagger away-

“You weren’t there for them?” she yells at his back, and she needs someone to shoot her, just sink a bullet into her brain and put her down like a rabid dog- “Fine! You weren’t there, and you didn’t see it, but _I was_ , Max, I _watched_ you-”

She is not going to scream at him, but she _is_ , and her face is not contorted, hot and hard and wet, but it _is_ \- “They’re _gone_ , and _I’m right here!_ ”

His whole body jerks like he’s been shot, like she’s sliced him open belly to chin, and he makes a noise like an engine seizing, sharp and _wrong_.

She wants to say she doesn’t mean it. She wants to say she’s sorry, she wants to suck the air back into her lungs so it burns her up inside instead of consuming him. She should die for him, she should die right now, and if dying means taking all the pain away from him, she’ll put the gun in her own mouth.  

“They're gone, and you're still with them,” she manages. She's crying, ugly and rough, and hugging herself because if she doesn't, she's going to amputate her whole arm at the shoulder and then stab herself through the heart. “You're with them, and they _stay_ with you, and I-”

She has to say it. She’s said too much already, and she hasn't stopped, and if she's doing this, if she's destroying them, ripping apart whatever precious thing they have between them-

She's a grenade. She always has been. That's what she is, a blunt force for maximum destruction. That's what she _does_ , and she is going to fucking blow a hole through the one good thing she's ever wanted for herself, and she’s not sure she can stop, or that she even _wants_ to. They've come too far, and the truth is a firestorm that she can't hold in.

“They’re with you,” she whispers. “They follow you and they haunt you, and if you die out here-” it's selfish, it's so fucking selfish, and she should just bite off her tongue at its root, let it fester and rot, she should just fucking _rot_ \- “...that's what _you'll_ do to _me_.”

Her oversight. Her greatest tactical weakness. He never asked for this, and she never volunteered for it, but here they are, twenty paces apart like they're staging a duel.

They'll kill each other this way. They already are.

He hasn't turned, and if she's going to die, she's going to go down swinging. “I don't know what's worse,” she goes on, “seeing it or _not_ seeing it. It's going to happen someday, and mothers, I hope it's me, because I can't handle it if it's you.”

She sees his shoulders heaving, the barrel of his ribs quivering inside the fabric of his shirt.

“I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry at _all_ ,” she says fiercely, and there’s true anger there, real and deep, and it leaps up like a flame given a gust of wind. “They fucking _hurt_ you, and I killed them, and I would do it again. I know what I am, Max, and if- if that’s not-” She takes a huge, shuddering breath. “You said we could ride together awhile, and if this is- if this is the end of the road, you have to leave me right here.”

It sounds like an ultimatum, and in a way it is, but it’s also the truth. Ace had said it once, that if she went after Max and he didn’t come back, she wouldn’t either. Ace had seen something long before she saw it herself, but now that she knows, amid the whirling chaos, there’s a strange kind of peace. She’s always known she’d die in battle; she’d just assumed the battle would be against an enemy.

“It’s not fine,” she concludes, her throat thick with furious tears. “And _that_ is why.”

He still hasn’t turned, hasn’t moved beyond the horrible, involuntary tremble of his body.

She’s killed them both. It was always going to happen. She’ll stay here, rooted in this spot until she’s eaten up by the sun, and he’ll go into the waste like the ghost he’s always been. The days will stretch into thousands, and they will never return to the Citadel, and the girls will always wonder, never knowing that she’s the grenade that’s blown them apart. The little bit of redemption she might have had is gone, if it ever even existed at all.

She doesn’t expect him to move. She doesn’t know what she expects.

She does _not_ expect to be crushed up against the side of the car with bruising force, trapped between his body and sun-baked metal. His face is wet, his eyes red and swollen. Blood soaks the flare of his nostrils and the stubble above his lips.

“Don’t _ever_ ,” he growls, “use them against me,” and for one endless, dizzying second, her body goes weightless and transparent, because she is utterly certain he’s going to snap her neck, and all she can feel is triumph that his face is the last thing she’ll ever see.

They stare at each other, ragged breaths and pounding hearts, and then he grinds out, “...what you said-”

She stands by it, every word. She hates herself, but she’s said it, and like the moment she’d taken the War Rig off-road, she’s passed the point of no return. This is the battlefield she’s chosen, and now she has to defend it. “Fool,” she says, because if he’s going to kill her, she knows at least he’ll be looking her in the eye.

She doesn’t know what she thinks he’ll do, but something inside him seem to snap, and then his mouth is on hers, sudden and brutal. He shoves her again, hard, and she ignites. The impact of his hips against hers is like a firing pin against primer, and then he’s roughly stripping off her leathers as she claws at his shirt. “You think,” he mutters, trapping her human hand above her head as he wrenches at her belt, “you’re the only one who’s scared?”

There are some moments having only one hand is a true disadvantage, so she grinds up against him, the ache in her phantom arm abruptly replaced with an clutching emptiness in her cunt.

“You think,” he goes on, tugging at his own ties, “I’d _let_ you go first?” The intensity in his eyes is unbearable, but she can’t look away. “That could _ever_ happen?”

She thinks of the searing way he’d looked at her, when she’d been hunched over the steering wheel trying to breathe while he’d been trapped in the People Eater’s limousine. She thinks of the way he’d shuddered beneath her thirty days ago, delirious and burning. They are halves of the same wheel, the two of them, linked by his blood in her veins and her breath in his mouth.

She can’t think of anything to say, not when he’s heaving out of his trousers, hands shaking with grief, rage and want. She can only wriggle so her leathers fall a little farther, and tilt her hips so he can thrust up and in.

She never realizes how empty she is until he fills her, and the stretch of her body around him is like the release of a pressure valve. When he’s inside her, all her doubts are erased. The fact of his existence is irrefutable, the reality of his presence cannot be questioned. He is hard and solid and healthy and _safe_ , and the scream of anxiety in her bones is mercifully smothered.

He’s with her, he’s _here_ , and they’re both on the ragged edge of hysteria, too many emotions and all of them far past the redline. He folds himself around her like he's expecting a hail of bullets, and she grips his waist with her knees, her stump around his shoulders, letting him push her up against the car even though the steel is blistering from the sun. The pain is as grounding as the weight of his body on hers, and she’s almost, _almost_ -

He buries his face in the hollow of her neck, his breath gone shuddery and rough in a way that has nothing to do with the way he’s fucking her. He’s still moving like an earthquake, the urge instinctive and deep, but he’s somewhere else, somewhere she can’t pull him out. His grip on her human wrist is crushing, and all she can do is hold on. Herself, she's boiling, a radiator steaming and incandescent and desperate to be filled. She angles her hips and _there_ , there's the friction, there's the contact. There's the electric connection where they fit together, the battery and the lead, coming together in a shower of sparks.

She’s a grenade, and she explodes, white-hot and shattered. He's right behind her, and the _noise_ he makes, buried deep in her shoulder, is like a wounded animal, torn from his throat in a hitching, agonized roar.

If she could get him any closer, if she could crawl under his skin and drink him like a parasite, she would still be impossibly, achingly too far away.

How many times has she thought she's lost him? How many times has he turned or ridden away? He's come back, he's come _back_ every single fucking time, and she's leaned on that, she's _relied_ on that. Thirty-one days ago he almost didn't, and it's sent shockwaves through them both, as if the Glow were a bomb instead of a mysterious chunk, and everything after is tainted by poison dust.

She can't let him go, but she doesn't own him. He is not a thing, and she's clutching at him like he _is_ , and destroying them both in the process. The right thing, the correct thing to do would be apologize - no, that's a lie, the right thing to do would have been to stitch her mouth shut, to cauterize her lungs and prevent herself from ever bludgeoning him with her words in the first place.

She should never speak again, to him or anyone. If she wasn't the monster she is, she'd do it herself, she'd walk into the Waste and never look back.

Her bitten lip is starting to throb, and the blood on his stubble is a bright, damp smear. It's almost noon, the sun just barely at its apex, but he’s shaking with fatigue, all his weight crushing the breath out of her.

They put their clothes back on, and he moves to slump against the other side of the car.

There’s nothing left to say.

 

****

 

He sleeps. She watches and she waits. The fever comes back, and she tucks him into the passenger seat, driving until she finds an abandoned outpost. The shack is too far gone to provide any meaningful shelter, but at the very least, it's meager protection against the blistering sun.

She'll take whatever she can get.

The first two days are the worst, although it's not as bad as it was, and for that she's abjectly grateful. He's grumpy and miserable, and she grits her teeth against the rising swell of panic.

 _You wake up and you shit and you die_.

He sleeps and he burns, low and deep, and when he is awake, he squats on the other side of the shack, his body violently rejecting anything he puts in it. She sets out the tarps at night, harvesting enough mist for a bottle, and actually catches a pair of lizards mating in the shadows.

They eat them raw, fresh and bleeding. She doesn’t miss the significance.

Four days pass, and he's gradually getting better. They could probably travel and they probably should - she's driving both of them mad, pacing and restless, cleaning her guns and checking and re-checking their supplies - but there's nowhere to go, no destination burning in her chest.

She doesn't want to go south. She doesn't want to go anywhere at all. The anger and fear are eroding, leaving an empty, sandy hollow that crumbles as it spreads.

The restlessness sinks into malaise. He sleeps, and for most of the day, it's too hot to move, so she lounges in the shade of the car with the tire at her back, listless and bored.

She’s drowning in the silence, but she's the one that brought it crashing down between them, so she can't be the one to break it. She can only wait, a radio aching for a signal she's not sure will ever come.

She stitches a tear in her shirt, then one in the passenger seat. She fixes a latch that’s rough to open. She's halfway through rewiring the ignition when his hand comes down on the hood, less a slap than a sudden change in equilibrium: “ _Enough_.”

It's the first either of them have said in a hands-worth of days.

“Fixing it,” she says.

“Isn't broken,” he responds, and with a hard flip of her stomach, she's not sure he's talking about his car.

She starts twisting the wires back together. He slides into the passenger seat and waits. When she’s done, she looks down at the pliers in her hand, her naked stump. Her prosthesis is hanging from the door, the claw caught in the trim. The ache in her phantom arm is throbbing and dull.

“This is it,” he says, and okay. She can handle this. If she looks up, if she looks at him at all, the prickling heat in her eyes will spill over, but she asked for this, and she will take it unflinching. “Furiosa.”

He almost never says her name. She knows when he’s talking to her, if he’s referencing her, and he always assumes she’s listening, because she always is. If he has to, he calls her “Furi”, a word truncated by the forces in his brain that crush his speech like falling rocks.

Their argument is the most she’s ever heard him speak, and she shredded him for it.

He clears his throat. “‘S the end of it.”

She makes herself nod.

He huffs in annoyance. “ _This_ ,” he repeats, and gestures to himself. “‘S done. Maybe a week, maybe more, but...it’s done.”

There are wires crossed under the steering wheel, and there are wires crossed in her brain, because she doesn’t-

And then the power sparks. He’s not talking about _them_ , the nebulous thing they have between them that she is, apparently, dedicated to destroying. He’s talking about being sick, about the poison leaving his body. She feels like she’s stomped hard on the brakes, but the force hasn’t yet hit.

“You,” he says very seriously, “can stop.” She has to look at him then, can’t avoid it, and whatever’s happening on her face, it must be so ridiculous that he stares at her with naked incredulity.

It doesn’t _seem_ ridiculous, and she’s suddenly hot with a brittle flare of anger. “Ithought-”

“Know what you thought.” He raises an eyebrow. It’s possible he’s punishing her, and she has to take it, she has to swallow it back and let him do it- “Gonna listen, mm?”

She wants to retort that she’s been listening all along, but the truth is that she _hasn’t_. Neither of them have. They’ve been talking past each other the entire time, so absorbed in their own anxieties that they’ve been completely missing what the other is trying to say.

She rubs the skin between her eyes. “Yes. I’m here.”

“Can’t just shred each other when things get bad.” He sighs. “Can’t make each other the enemy when there’s nothing to see.”

Her throat is closing up. “I know.”

“We both got things...” He looks up at the ceiling, searching for the words amid the torn and dusty header. “...both been hurt.” He hums. “Got something good, though. Shame to see it gone.”

Miss Giddy had a wordburger: _don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater_. Furiosa had shuddered at that, remembering Joe’s discarded daughters, their tiny mouths open in a silent cry as they sank in the pool. It wasn’t until the meaning had been explained, the intent teased out, that it started to make sense.

“What I said,” she starts, but doesn’t know how to finish. She wants to apologize for hurting him, but she can’t apologize for the words, and they’re intrinsically linked. She can’t apologize for one without the other.

He chews his way through the thought: “Wasn’t...wrong,” he allows.

“It hurt you. I shouldn’t have said it.”

He hums. “Out here, everything hurts.”

Of course he’s throwing her own words back at her, of course-

“That,” he says. “Right there.”

She blinks.

“We survive,” he says, “by fighting the Wasteland. If we’re gonna to make it, can’t be fighting ourselves.”

She’s never had a partner for this. She’s had crew, and she’s had allies she never quite trusted, and before they’d left the Citadel, she’s had him, slowly worming his way into being indispensable. She’s never been this far away from relatively-defined safety, and the tactics for surviving the Wasteland are radically different from the ones she’d perfected under Joe’s regime. There’s a nonzero chance she’d make it back to the Citadel without Max - she’s ruthless, she can develop the skills, even on such a steep learning curve - but the reality is that’s almost entirely bluster. She knows she won’t last long out here without him, because she won’t _want_ to.

It’ll be something small, the smoke from a raider fire she dismisses as a cloud, an insignificant cut she doesn’t bother to clean, water that numb senses don’t tell her is bad. It’ll come down on her fast and hard, and if she has any luck at all, it’ll take her quickly.

She knows exactly what kind of luck she has.

They’ve been away from the Citadel for less than a hundred days, and all the freedom the Waste suddenly feels like a vacuum, sucking the air from her lungs and draining the blood from her head. She has no control over any of this, not the Waste, not their supplies, not his body, not her own, not the fucking satellites that slide indifferent through the night.  

He’s looking at her with a kind of sad sympathy, and he _gets_ it. He was in her position once, and probably even worse, reeling from the deaths of his loved ones and not caring if he lived or died. He’s got the kind of sheer stupid luck that keeps him going, even if it takes its pound of flesh in the process.

Hope is a mistake. She hadn’t understood. She thought she did, but she couldn’t, not until right now, as he’s sitting in front of her with the last traces of an invisible poison lingering in his veins. Hope is about control, and if she’s just going to be buffeted around by the capricious wind of fate, she can’t even _try_ to maintain control. The only way to survive is to go limp, to surrender her agency and do her best to land in a place that’s slightly better than the last. It’s a passive sort of fight that she _recognizes_ , the fight that uses the aggressor’s own strength against them.

He’s drifted. He _knows_. She’s hidden in plain sight for thousands of days, sharpening her teeth and waiting for the day to strike. It’s different, but it’s the _same_.  

“Oh.” It’s hitting her all at once, like the shadowless particles he’d tried to explain emanated from the Glow.

He hums. If he were anyone else, he’d have beaten it into her, gotten frustrated and dumped her, sold her at the nearest trading post or killed her outright. Instead, he’s let her learn, nudging her in one direction or the other as he’s needed to. He’s teaching her, and it’s so quiet, so instinctual that she’s not even sure he realizes he’s doing it. Once, he’d been the sort of person to jettison dead weight - she’d seen it in his eyes, the blind panic that made him use a shotgun that didn’t work to hijack a rig he didn’t know how to start. He would have left them all in the dust that day, left them to Joe’s absent mercy, and she had understood exactly.

It wouldn’t have been the worst act he’d committed. It’s how he knows she burned that town without seeing her do it. It’s why he was angry about it, because he’d been that person once, and ever since he’d passed her the rifle as they fanged it through the Rock Riders’s canyon, he’s been trying to recover. He’s been trying to bring her along with him. He’s taken her quest for redemption and made sure she’s kept on the right path.

She’d known he’s trying to heal her, because that’s what he does. This isn’t a revelation, it’s a thing she’s running into over and over and over again, because she keeps sinking back into ruts that are cut hard and deep. She’s learning that she’s going to keep doing this, over and over, maybe for the rest of her life. This isn’t their first fight, and it’s absolutely not their last, but at the end of it all, they keep moving.

She can do this. If he can do it, so can she, and she has him to guide her. “What can I do?”

His answer is immediate. “We go south.”

“There’s nothing south.”

“Don’t know that.”

“You need more time.”

He shrugs. “Doesn’t have to mean it’s all in one place.”

“What I said before-” she starts, because _mothers_ , she’s stubborn and she can’t let go of anything once it’s in her grasp-

“We keep moving,” he says reasonably, and she shouldn’t be forgiven, but she is. They are going to keep shredding each other, over and over, but he’s going to keep healing her, and she’s going to keep letting him. He reaches over and palms her head, pulling her against his shoulder.

There’s a long, quiet moment, and then he says, “...so, load the car?”

A bubble of hysterical laughter rises in her chest. “...you’re _bored_.”

He hums.  

He’s a terrible patient, and she’s a terrible medic, but in the end they have nowhere else to go but forward.

 


End file.
